One Response to SD45 902

  1. Mark Davidson says:
    March 21, 2025 at 12:16 PM

    Location is Denison, Texas.

    The locomotive is just before passing over the roadway grade crossing with West Day Street, MP 637.1, in Denison, Texas. The second locomotive is General Motors (GM) Electro-Motive Division (EMD) SD45 SLSF 913. Between the first and second cars the train is passing over the at grade crossing diamond with the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (MKT or Katy) Railroad, MP 637.0. Train is southbound on the Sherman Subdivision using 7.4 miles of trackage rights on the Southern Pacific (SP) (Houston & Texas Central (H&TC)) Railroad from S. P. Junction, MP 636.6, just south of Denison, MP 636.5, to North Sherman Junction, MP 644.0. The overpass is U.S. Highway 69 / South Eisenhower Parkway / South Austin Avenue. Photographer is standing on West Day Street just west of its “T” shaped intersection with South Council Lane.

    The MKT railroad grade crossing was the southwestern part of a triangle within the Texas interlocking plant at Tower 93. The tower was commonly known as “Lamar Tower”, named for an adjacent city avenue. The diamond crossing is on the Katy’s Dallas Subdivision, S. P. Crossing, MP 661.2. This was on their freight main cutoff bypass to their old, and later new, Ray Yard in Denison. At the time of the photograph this automatic interlocking was approach activated on a first come – first served basis. Their rail line is distinguished in this view by the dark rail and contrasting, grayer ballast color to the left of the auto racks.

    Tower 93 interlocking controlled a near equilateral triangular shaped set of tracks and junctions. Pointing north, the interlocking began a couple of blocks south of the Denison depot. The eastern leg provided Katy passenger trains, and freights by-passing Ray Yard on the west side of Denison, access to their Dallas Subdivision. The western leg permitted passenger and freight trains access to the Katy’s Denison Depot, Denison Shops complex, Ray Yard, their Sherman and Fort Worth Subdivisions. This leg also included two well separated diamond crossings with the Frisco Sherman / SP Denison Subdivision. The east / west orientation southern leg provided a Katy freight by-pass route to and from the Dallas Subdivision and Ray Yard.

    On the SP / H&TC this is their Denison Subdivision, M-K-T Crossing, MP 337.3. Denison, MP 337.9, was the northern most extension of their railroad in Texas. SP Employee Timetables note that Tower 93, MP 337.5, has “Two M-K-T Crossings”. This is the southern of the two diamond crossings with the Katy, approximately 1,056’ (0.2 miles) southwest of the interlocking tower and northern diamond crossing. The northern diamond and east leg of the interlocking plant were removed in 1988.

    The 1913 built interlocking plant was originally an electrically operated system with 30 levers. By 1915 there was an increase to a 34 lever system. A significant change took place in late 1926 when the interlocker type was converted to an electro-pneumatic control system. By then turnouts were operated by air supplied from a compressor and storage reservoir in the first floor of the interlocking tower. Armstrong push pull rods were deemed impractical due to the distances involved between the three major control points of the interlocking. By 1964 the southwest quadrant diamond with the Frisco / SP and MKT was converted to an automatic interlocking.

    The southeast junction switch of the triangular shaped Tower 93 interlocking was just across the street from the Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site. The home is located on the northeast corner of South Lamar Avenue and East Day Street. Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower was an American military officer who obtained the rank of five-star General of the Army, was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe during World War II, a noted statesman and 34th President of the United States. He is buried at the Eisenhower Presidential Center in Abilene, Kansas.

    The northern diamond of the interlocking plant was just north of East Nelson Street. The tower stood just south of this at grade diamond crossing inside the triangle formed by the interlocking. Three blocks to the north is the Katy Depot on the north side of East Main Street. The union depot, built in 1911, once served the Frisco, Katy, SP / H&TC, Texas and Pacific (T&P) Railway and Kansas, Oklahoma and Gulf (KO&G) Railroad. It is now a multi occupancy retail, dining, office, shared rental workspaces and event venue, with residential lofts on the second and third floors. The depot address is 101 East Main Street, Denison, Texas 75021-3076.

    Located across the street, a block and a half to the west, of the Katy “Union” Depot is the Red River Railroad Museum. In the storefront museum are artifacts and information on the area’s railroads. The primary focus of the museum is on the Katy’s operations in and around Denison. The museum address is 124 West Main Street, Denison, Texas 75021.

    Down the street the museum has a collection of equipment on display across the tracks east of the depot. Items in the collection include F38B MKT 401B, end copula caboose MKT 1021 (renumbered 1024), wide vision cabooses MKT 115, MKT 141, De Soto, Missouri shops built bay window road caboose MP 13731, tank cars including a 10,000 gallon MKT 6066, a 4,039 gallon ACFX 488, an unnumbered cut-down low side war emergency gondola, a maintenance of way speeder storage shed and a Texas State Historical Marker – “North-South Railway Connection”.

    Two blocks to the south, on the west side of the tracks, stands the former MKT Freight House. It is located on the northeast corner of South Houston Avenue and East Crawford Street. At one time a vine covered extended or wide vision caboose, MKT 118, was parked on an isolated section of track on the east side of the freight room dock. It had been owned by the E. F. Davis Company, an Anheuser-Bush distributor, a former tenant in the freight house. It was donated in February 2016 to the Fannin County Museum. It was repainted Katy red in 2017 and now resides at the museum’s former T&P depot in Bonham, Texas. The museum is located at One Main Street, Bonham, Texas 75418.

    Just to the north northwest of the southern diamond crossing was the Katy’s Denison Shops complex. The large multi building shops complex helped maintain the railroad system’s fleet of locomotives, freight and passenger cars. The shops were located between Katy’s station of McCune, MP 660.7, immediately east of South Armstrong Avenue, the South Eisenhower Parkway overpass and SLSF / SP tracks. To the north they were bounded by the original Katy Fort Worth Subdivision main south of West Morgan Street and north of East Day Street.

    The shops once employed over 600 persons at a time. This included for a short period (1889-1892) the future president’s father, David Jacob Eisenhower, a college-educated engineer. While in the shops he worked as a mechanic. The shops were the railroad’s main car repair facility for the system. The shops would be closed and torn down after the Katy became part of the Union Pacific.

    With the purchase of the MKT by the Missouri Pacific (MP or MoP) Railroad on 8/12/1988, merger into the MP on 12/1/1989 and subsequently the MP’s merger into the Union Pacific (UP) Railroad on 1/1/1997, they now had two roughly parallel former Katy lines in Texas from Denison through Dallas and Fort Worth to Hillsboro north of Waco. One was deemed adequate. As a result, Katy’s former Dallas Subdivision was abandoned out of Denison. Therefore, the freight bypass route, interlocking and diamond were eliminated in 1990.

    Subsequently, changing traffic patterns had resulted in a decrease in interchange for the Southern Pacific (SP) in north Texas. Therefore, it deemed their route between Denison and Sherman as surplus in 1993. This resulted in the sale of their 13.3 mile line from S. P. Junction, MP 636.6, at Denison to South Sherman Junction, MP 649.9, to Frisco’s successor railroad. This ownership change eliminated the former Frisco trackage rights agreement in favor of direct ownership of the line between these points. This transaction included the transfer of Texas interlocking Tower 16, MP 645.7, in Sherman to that successor railroad.

    Frisco’s second successor railroad decommissioned and retired Tower 16 on 10/23/2001. At that time traffic control between Denison and Sherman was fully transferred to their Network Operations Center (NOC) in Fort Worth. Fortunately, the tower was preserved, dismantled and relocated from Sherman to the Grapevine Vintage Railroad at 707 South Main Street, Grapevine, Texas 76051. This is just over 3 miles northwest from the heart of Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport. The tower was reconstructed, refurbished and stands in a parking lot diagonally across the tracks from their former St. Louis Southwestern (Cotton Belt) depot.

    View is looking northeast.

    Hope this helps.

    Thanks!

    Mark

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